Doubt Academy 5: Tsuchi

hello everyone, it’s bee!! 

HERE.. WE ARE.. IT’S DONE. I’M DONE. WE ACTUALLY GOT HERE LAUGH.... if you missed seeing it live and don’t wanna be mm spoilers you can read it in order here! read the deadblog here!! thanks for those of you that stuck around through it all, and offered support and pats on the back when the mod team and players needed it, thanks for participating and thanks for reading! 

i hope this offers closure for everyone, i know some of us really needed it

extra special shoutout and thanks to nin for all the support and help through this entire game, i don’t know where i would be without you! a massive thanks to dazy for lifting us all back above water when we needed it the most, i don’t know where the game would be without you. a thanks to shout, art, adam and katie for helping out while the game was up and going; drea and kat for starting this off, and katie (again) and lex for the huge, huge help with endgame! it was bumpy but we made it through

but yeah! there’s not much i really wanted to say here but give thanks where thanks is due! keep an eye out on the main doubt blog for any da6 news if you’re interested, it should be coming up soon! katie and nik have lots of really neat plans for the game, so do check it out! 

Perhaps I should correct myself, seeing as though things have changed since the beginning.

This story ends like this: 48 students. 48 students between two boats, leaving a once deserted island deserted once more, watching the clouds roll by and the waves crash against the bow of the boats. It’s been a few months at best since the so-called “Hope’s Peak Academy” shipped you all out on an all-expense-paid trip to the islands of Kaze or the underwater world of Mizu, and now it was the end.

You’d been so hopeful, so excited back then, and now.. now, actually, you suppose you are just as hopeful and excited. Funny how things worked out, huh? It was over, you were almost free! This… this nightmare could finally be put behind you, after all this time.

So, my dear readers—my dear students, your story ends with the sky and the water and, for the first time in a very long time, everything is glowing blue.

A quiet life… that was odd to think about now, wasn’t it? Life had never been quiet for either of you, and all this planning and preparing and executing had never given either of you the chance to settl— ah, hm.

…

…

...What, neither of you are going to interrupt me? Am I in the clear? Can I do what I was meant to do and narrate endgame?

“...Sure, why the hell not. This is getting boring, anyways. How do you people write these long-ass exposition dumps for fun?”

“Oh, don’t worry. I plan on interrupting you the moment you say something distasteful.”

Wonderful! Let’s get started, then! Or, I suppose, let us… end this.

So, you—you, the students, that is—who have either just awoken from the pods that kept you sealed for all these months, or who have been up and about for sometime now, regard Haru and Tobio as they banter back and forth in a conversation you can’t help but feel you’re missing all the context for. There’s questions and answers and rolling of eyes and low hisses, but aside from the beef they might have for each other, one other thing is clear—that these two are to blame for all the death you were forced to witness, forced to participate in. Some of you might’ve thought, in that moment of realization, that there should be outrage! Raised voices! Punches thrown! Maybe even an execution like they’d made some of you go through! …But all that didn’t… no, you were tired of this. It had been dragged out far too long, and for those of you that just woke up, it might even feel as though you could tuck it away as a bad dream. Why feed into that nightmare any more?

But what now, then? The story is over, as far as the first post in this endgame described—the sky had gone black and everything fell apart in textured lines—but here you are, awake and alive despite it all. Confused and perhaps a bit drowsy, but alive nonetheless. And that was something! That was something, something you could work with.

The voices start to pipe up among you — comments and remarks, jokes and puns to lighten to mood, questions and then, finally, plans. It’s similar to a trial, in some sense — theories and suggestions being thrown forward, other students jumping in and adding to them. You had all learned quite a few things during the course of the game, most of which revolved around heartbreak and fear, but also, also, that if you all came together, then you could solve something.  

Between the conversations and reunions, your two masterminds eventually tune into what was buzzing around them, and, with a glance to each other, they turn to address the class. Neither of them were stupid despite what some of you may think—they had puppeteered this entire thing on their own—if their ideal plan ended with two classes of trained, immensely talented and practically brainwashed students performing a jailbreak and potentially creating the fall of society, then surely they would have a way to move you from the island back to civilization.

So… 

So, boats, of course! Two separate boats for two separate classes, both originally sailed by your “fake” hosts to get you to Sekai mansion in the first place. You’d never been stranded here—the area of the dock had just always been closed off without proper ID permissions, which, of course, your two masterminds have. The boats were always going to be how you all left the island anyway, however when they’d planned it, that was going to be much, much, much later.

(Also, how cool would it have looked, rolling over the waves with a bunch of murderous and bloodthirsty teens squatting and posing as they came into view of land?)

“Yeah, I guess? Look, I don’t know how I got here, or even how they got here, but I’m done. Like I said, for me, the whole point of bringing you all here and forcing you into this game was to convince you guys to perform a jailbreak, but I don’t want that anymore. I thought that using everyone would be easy - that I wouldn’t have any problem staying detached - but I couldn’t have been more wrong. The initial plan involved wiping your memories between rounds, and while I don’t particularly care if the likes of Quinn and Nishida never utter my name again, but…”

“...Kei-chan, Setsuna-chan, Si-Hoo...I didn’t expect to like them all as much as I do, and I’m so sorry for lying to them. I fucked up. If they never forgive me, I won’t blame them. I don’t want pity, and I’m not going to stand here and refuse to take responsibility for everything. But I probably could have left, right? I could have taken the rescue vehicle when I woke up and just stranded everyone here. The fact that I didn’t - the fact that I stayed behind and tried to fix things - says something, right? But...but, you know, whatever, if all of them decide they hate me, then, I mean, their loss. So, yeah, whatever. My life’s great. Ironically, better than it was before Uotani and I did what we did, and, really, I guess it’s the same for some of you all. I mean, Fujiwara and Kagata probably wouldn’t have met if not for me and Uotani, and considering how disgustingly affectionate those two were, they’re probably better off after this whole ordeal.”

Some apology.

“Except there was a problem. I genuinely started to like some of you. And as soon as I realized what was happening, I tried to close myself off and force myself to think of you like test subjects, but...the entire house hated us - the ‘us’ being me and Si-Hoo - and I couldn’t just abandon him knowing that if I did, he might not have anyone left. So I came clean to him. And...if you tell a boy you’re the one who kidnapped him and forced him to kill his classmates, and he tells you that it’s okay and that he loves you, you don’t keep hurting him. So as soon as Si-Hoo and I started dating, I came to the realization that all of this needed to end, whether Uotani was okay with that or not.”

So you decided to screw around with the system, despite not knowing what you were doing.

“Right. Trust me, I didn’t want anything bad to happen to...well, maybe I was okay with bad things happening to some of you, but Kei-chan, Setsuna-chan, Tahara, Hanamoto...hell, even Kuma and Tanaka? They were all still in there. We may not have known exactly what we were doing, but we were as careful as we could be.”

‘We’?

“Er, well, yeah. I kind of...well, Kin knew their way around the controls, right? I mean, they’d tried shutting down the program once before, so after Himeno was executed, I took them aside and told them who I was. I guess...maybe they figured that if I was willing to put myself at risk by exposing my identity, I was genuine about wanting to help. And, you know, the two of us were...friends, I guess. Or at least, I saw them as a friend. We never really discussed the nature of our relationship, so I...suppose it’s possible that they thought otherwise. Anyway, we snuck into the control room and started hitting buttons. The goal was to force the simulation to shut down from the outside, but all we really did was make things unbearable in there for a bit. Sorry for the, uh, two hour loop of Kanye West. Completely unintended. Unless Kin’s sense of humor really is that warped, in which case, you’ll need to take up your grievances with them. Anyway, I don’t think we ever got close to freeing you guys, but we did annoy Uotani to the point where they hit the force quit button, so I think the mission was successful no matter how you look at it.”

“Ugh, will you please just let that go? Look, when I mentioned my friends back then, I didn’t mean to suggest that they were all good people. And, you know, Kitaru’s not the only one who ended up in jail. Atsuo...his life got ruined, too, and it was my fault. I’m aware that it was. But I got letters from him. Bad letters. He threatened to track me down when he got out, threatened to slit my mom’s throat...and when Kaze was hit by the fear fog, mine...mine came in the form of Atsuo. His shadow was always behind me - making threats, telling me things I’m sure I deserved - and it wasn’t the easiest thing to cope with. Kei...Kei was great, and he made sure I was alright, and when I passed out next to the statue that night, he had every opportunity to kill me, but he didn’t. And looking back, I…

…

...a-anyway, the point is that my mind was in a constant haze, and during the investigation, I went into the forest alone, and I paid the price. That’s all there is to it.”

And then you woke up in Sekai.

“Right. And what a surprise that was. Seriously, it wasn’t supposed to work like that. Everyone was just supposed to stay fast asleep in their pods until one of us decided you guys were ready for action. But there was obviously something wrong, because I woke up, and so did everyone else. One by one, they all woke up. But here’s where it gets interesting: we were voting alongside you guys every trial.”

“...Not on who we thought did it, of course, but on who we wanted to die. Not only that, but those motives you all got every week? Yeah, we were the ones proposing them. We tried to tailor them to the people we wanted to join us, but, well, that never quite worked out as intended, since most people tried for Kuma or Hayashi. Kuma, because he’s a hacker and the thought was that he could dismantle the program from the outside, and Hayashi...well, honestly, I just think everyone was smitten with Hayashi after his big reveal. Naturally, I voted for Kei and Setsuna, so the two of you can thank me for trying to get you out of that place.”

You just don’t want them to hate you. You know they’re going to.

“...anyway, I’m sure you’re all wondering why the groups merged. That was never supposed to happen. Kaze and Mizu were supposed to remain entirely separate entities, but Kin decided to attempt to hack the system and force it to shut down. The end result is that the two games combined.”

“Uotani, what the hell-?”

They say that death is instantaneous. That one minute, you could just be minding your own business and the next, BAM. Well, you wouldn’t know, because you’re not dead, but this transition — the shift from your ordinary plane of existence to this one — is just as abrupt as any other. And, really, everyone thinks you’re dead already, right? After all, they all saw your corpse. They saw you laying there, lifeless, your skin charred and—

“Alright, that’s enough. Can we not talk about that again?”

Sorry. Why don’t you tell your side of the story, then?

“Mhmhm. Well, let’s see. I suppose none of this would make sense without knowing why I did what I did. I trust that Uotani already filled everyone in on our past? How we met at orientation and deferred enrollment so we could spend the year ruining everyone’s lives? Yeah, well, it turns out that the two of us had something in common. They already mentioned that they have an ex rotting in prison, right? Well, the thing is, so do I, except he’s not my ex. The thing you have to know is that my friends and I were involved in something very illegal, and Kitaru -- that was his name -- took the fall for me. Since it was my fault he ended up behind bars, I figured it was my duty to get him out. And that’s where you all come in.”

“So our plan was to help you guys break the two of them out of jail. With each subsequent round of mutual killing, your memories would be wiped on a conscious level, but subconsciously, you would retain your survival tactics. I mean, how are we supposed to stage a prison break if you guys have no idea how to react if a guard pulls a gun on you, you know? We figured there would be casualties either way, and we stood a better chance if you guys weren’t afraid to take out the guards for us. Now, as for getting you to actually agree to help us…”

“...I guess I was just hoping that asking you would work, but I was never going to force any of you to go along with our plan. You have my word on that.”

Haru mentioned something about burning down government buildings, and-

“What?! No! Look if they wanted to stage a hostile takeover of Japan, that’s all them. I’m not going to stand here and lie and say I wasn’t excited at the prospect of watching you all kill one another, because I was, but my primary goal was getting Kitaru back. The group of you putting on a show for us was just kind of...an added benefit.”

Okay, so now that that’s out of the way, what’s been going on since your...ahem…”accident”?

"Now what? Of course, I'm angry as hell when we wake up back in the mansion, because it’s… not what I expected. Nobody should have been out of the simulation before I cut it off, but it looked like people— all the ‘dead kids’ that should have been… well, dead, in the program, waiting to respawn next round— had all been awake for… a while? Hell, maybe even weeks? Like they were living there. Add that on top of the fact that the program I had spent months working on was beyond repair at this point and it looked like there was a crowd of people by the control panels, which should have been locked up, and I just kinda. Intense burning. Seething rage. Frustration. Et cetera.”

I mean… I’m sure there’s probably some logical explanation…

“Yeah, but do I look like the kind of person who’d jump to that conclusion?”

...Fair point.

“So like, instead of keeping my cool and laying low so nobody figures out this is all my fault and I deserve an ass-kicking to make up for my lack of a formal execution, let everything slide and all, I do the exact opposite.”

What a surprise, Haru.

“That is to say, I flip my shit. Shove everybody out of my way like ‘Hey, what the fuck do you think you’re doing?’ and ‘You’re screwing everything up!’ and ‘Get your hands off of my program!’ and all of that fun incriminating bull.”

Thanks.

“Look, can you really blame me for being on edge, I was in a room full of people I personally betrayed and kidnapped, everything was going to hell, and the cops may or may not be out for my blood. And nothing made sense.

Because like, really, I had no idea what the hell had happened out here, or what the hell I was supposed to do next, and the only person who would be able to give me any realistic answers was…”

Wait.

What’s with that pause.

Don’t tell me you’re going to—

"...Wait one moment. I gotta grab somebody."

"Cool. Now that all that exposition’s out of the way, back to the present. You know all about all the crap that actually happened in the game, and I don’t feel like running through it all when you guys can just click the handy little “archive” button on the blog’s header and read it all yourselves, so we’re gonna start at the beginning of the end, once everything becomes a giant string of question marks. So basically, shit gets wild. Not the fun wild, either. I’m talking like, glitch central. I mean, you know this, considering our lovely first narrator gave you a nice little rundown.”

Thank you! I do try, you know.

"And I'm sitting here like 'Dude, what the fuck.' I've been pissy about this for months because like, um, Super High School Level Technical Support here, my code was perfect— I would know, I debugged the shit out of all of my parts, because I can actually do my damn job. It's almost like some asshole was deleting huge chunks of the code or trying to change lines without knowing what they do. Y’know the chorus of Evanescence’s Bring Me To Life? Yeah, imagine that blasting at full volume inside my head.

Everybody's screaming and shit. Like, that's when it hits me. We needed to stop. The program was (supposed to be) overwriting everybody’s brains. If this glitched up mess continued or if whoever was fucking with it didn’t stop, we ran serious risk of irreparably fucking up somebody’s head. And like, fandom secret, I actually like some of these kids. They deserve better than that. And I was… kinda-sorta over the original plan— or uh. At least I recognized that it was never going to work at this point and I was a dumbass for trying in the first place. Would’ve been nice but. Shit wasn’t meant to be I guess.

Fun little fact, there are two backdoors out of the program in Kaze and Mizu— like, not buttons but like? Cheat codes, I guess you'd say. Anyways, I put them in for us, that way we'd be able to end the games when we felt like, since, y’know, it’s not like there was a big red X button floating in the sky either of us could just click on. So I'm standing around watching hell break loose and then I just. 'Fuck it, I can't do this anymore.' Nobody really notices me run off to the Otohime statue, and if they do I doubt their first thoughts are gee, Haru, that's really suspicious and mastermind-y of you, you're acting like you know what's going on because we've been trapped in here for so long that I would bet five million yen that everybody collectively stopped giving a shit. And… you know.”

So you stop the mutual killing games before it can get worse.

“And like… poof. It all goes black. The game ends. And everything is dead for a second.”

“So. Uh. Anarchy. Dismantling the establishment board by board. Yeah...”

...Haru.

“...”

...So.

“So.”

Anyways.

“Sigh. Anyways. We borrowed a mansion—"

You mean, you stole a mansion.

"Look, it was abandoned, who gives a shit about the minor details? We set up camp on this private island in this abandoned house we code-named Sekai Mansion, and then set out to gather our class. Because like, you can’t fit 50 people in a two-bedroom apartment in the middle of Tokyo. Or drag their unconscious bodies up the stairs without one of your neighbors freaking out and calling the police.”  

Shouldn’t you mention how everyone is…?

“Oh right, right. Sorry, kids, you're not actually Super High School Levels! No predespair or anything. Wow, what a twist. Nope, we basically #hacked a list of potential HPA candidates, picked like forty-something at random, and then sent out fake invitation letters for them to come to this bogus new Hope’s Peak branch— kinda like catfishing except, y’know, pretending to be a prestigious academy that totally isn’t planning on throwing you in a murder game.

I mean, people bought it without ever thinking to Google the school and see if it was legit, so? That’s their fault, I guess.

Y’all took the bait, showed up for the Totally Nonexistent School That Never Has And Never Will Exist, aaaaaand then proceeded to be knocked unconscious by Sousuke and Minoru, hooked up, and plopped into the middle of hell almost seamlessly, as if nothing was out of the ordinary. They became Hikaru and Jaejin, me and my partner went into our separate classes underneath their noses, and everybody was none the wiser.

Mm, alright, not too bad. My way of telling the story was still better, but I’ll give you credit.  

“LMAO, thanks. So I guess you’re— not you, narrator-chan, the people reading this— are probably thinking damn, that’s actually a really shitty mastermind plan. I was totally fucking pumped to see Kyoji Yasuda’s gorgeous face bless us all for like the fifth time in a row, and now you’re telling me this is just the pet project of two scrubs working out of their apartment for funsies? No Collective, no Doctrina Artifice? Laaaaaame. And first off, thanks. For real, thanks. Really appreciate it.”

I mean, Yasuda is everyone’s problematic fave.

“Okay, sure, whatever. But wait. There’s more to this… spinoff? Side story? Footnote in the grand scheme of things? Direct-To-DVD Doubt Academy Sequel? Whatever you wanna call this break from the main plot. Y’see, my— our— plan was kinda like an onion, in that it had multiple layers.”

Did you… Did you really just use that analogy w—

“We let Sousuke and Minoru believe we were just building a mutual killing game, but shit got really edgy once you looked past the death noodles and the scrubs putting questionable substances in their mouths and the cowboy alien hunter. Because like, real talk, I’m not actually about that Monobear life. The actual purpose was more like… so Sousuke sent me— Otohime, whatever— the murder program so she could set it up in Sekai Mansion, right? I added in a small...ish section of code of my own before he would notice anything had been changed.

That code basically kept everyone’s previous memories, but… not where anybody would be able to remember them. Like, unconsciously repressed, you feel? The idea was that, after every mutual killing game, things would get progressively more violent, since everyone would be more desensitized to the whole death thing than they were at the start of the last game, even if they didn’t realize it. People would jump on the idea to murder Hikaru and Jaejin for their own survival, friends would turn on each other, the whole nine yards.

At the same time, the code— as I like to call it, Otohime-dot-EXE— would also be rewriting some brain stuff, assaulting everyone’s minds with subliminal messages, and… to make a long story short, the end goal here was to basically turn all of our classmates into human weapons that we could order to help us set Tokyo on fire, destroy multiple government buildings, and dismantle society as we know it?”

...

“Before you freak out, we didn’t even get through one game without Sousuke’s part of the code shitting out on us, so you guys are all fine. Wouldn’t be surprised if it didn’t even execute to start with.”

Haru, what the fuck.

“What? It seemed reasonable at the time.”

How the hell is trying to commit treason by kidnapping fifty people and forcing them to kill each other over and over again reasonable?

“Well… uh. Not to like, make things awkward and open the thirty-page can of worms that is My-Tragic-Backstory-dot-TXT (because. that’s uh. a story for another day) but… let’s just say I was a bitter, angsty person two years ago, blamed society for all of my problems, and figured this was the best way to enact vengeance on everybody who had ever personally wronged me. Andslashorbreakmyexboyfriendoutofprison.”

...

“...So there were a lot of kinks in the plan. But. Like. The ends justify the means, right?”

...

“Ri...ght…?”

“Okay, where the hell to begin. If you haven't figured it out by now, then surprise! None of this is real! Wow! Don’tcha just love virtual reality shenanigans? To make a long story short, since I doubt you really care about the specifics at this point, Murder-Hell-dot-EXE is basically like, a hardcore Dangan Ronpa fanboy’s dream, where—"

Okay, first off: Haru, you can't reference the game this RP is based off of from inside of the RP, that’s like. Illegal. Or something. Give us more expository, give us more.. There I stood, watching the world dissolve around me, when—

"Fight me. ANYWAYS, it’s a virtual simulation of a mutual killing game… all of the mutual killing games, really, considering we put in exact replicas of all of Hope’s Peak’s… stuff or whatever you wanna call it to go along with our two brand new locations. Y’know, in case you ever wanted to join in on the fun of murdering your friends, without any of the physical real-world consequences. And once the game ended, whether it be through a mastermind execution or a killer victory or whatever, the entire thing would reset back to the first day of Prologue, with everybody’s memories of the previous game wiped, so these things could go on again and again and again.

What we— me and the other mastermind— did was we contacted these two dudes that we basically picked off of the front page of the Hope’s Peak forums, who were like, wow, oh my gosh, Hope’s Peak Academy is soooooo cool, I just love how it keeps getting involved in scandals where it turns out they were experimenting on and murdering their students, wouldn’t it be great to actually get to live that life? And I was like, ‘Wow. Okay. That’s a little weird but… we can use that.’

We created a persona and named her Otohime Fujiwara, so like, they wouldn’t know that the masterminds weren’t randomized every game and that we knew what the hell was really going on and like, you know, in case they turned out to not be legit and wanted to turn us into the police or something. She’s that really cute girl you may or may not have noticed carved completely out of rock in Kaze. Or maybe she got mentioned once or twice around the dead kids. I don’t know. Not like I was there or anything. And we contacted them through her, pretending to be super passionate about Hope’s Peak like they were. We were also super passionate about murder.

Anyways, all three of us came to the agreement that starting our own mutual killing game sounded like a great way for them to live out their life goals of getting to experience murder hell. They agreed to do it on the condition that we’d let them pretend to be previous Hope’s Peak students— Hikaru Ookami and Jaejin Kinjo— inside of the game so they could roleplay out their dreams of actually being Super High School Level at something, and Otohime would act as like… Kyoko Yasuda, Yasuda’s long-lost daughter or something inside of the program, who was the one pulling strings in the fake plot we fed those two.

The dude who y’all know as Ookami, his name’s Sousuke, designed the actual mutual killing game. Like, the level designs for Kaze and Mizu and shit, the executions, Monobear, all of that good stuff. Mainly because that’s way too much work for one beautiful tech support agent to try and pull off by themself, and I had no idea what I was doing on that front. Jaejin— Minoru— helped with the more… IRL parts of it all, namely with shit involving getting dirt on you guys, and I… well. You see. I was busy doing...

"Look, I'm gonna be frank— your storytelling skills suck ass.”

...What? Do not.

"Yeah, they do."

We’ve hardly even started the story, you can’t judge me for just th—

“Well, it sucks. I’m like, falling asleep, and I’m in the story. Could it kill you to get to the point already?”

Storytelling, thank you very much, is about setting the stage, drawing out the suspense, reaching the…! Just… get back in the narrative.

“Look, all I’m saying is that this is probably the lamest endgame I’ve ever seen. Do you guys even know what the hell is going on? Y’know, this snoozefest could really benefit from somebody who… oh, I don’t know… was there… living it… every day... may or may not actually be Mizu’s mastermind— oh, shit, spoiler alert for anybody who didn’t guess that much from my convenient fourth-wall breaking—”

…

Sigh.

Alright, fine, you take a shot at narrating endgame then, Satan. It’s not as easy as it sounds.

"Fabulous, thanks.”

Ping, pong, ping, paaang!

Man has it ages since that keyphone of yours has started vibrating.

Ping, pong, pin̡g, p͏aaa̧aa͞a̴an̛g!!

… Or, made weird sounds?

“E͏̵͞ee͢h́͝h, wakey wakey eggs with bacey, this is your s̡̢͞e̕a̵ ͏̴̷air̛ ̡s͘͞͝e͡ŕ̡͜g̶̸̵ę̕t҉̛͜ti͜͡a̷n͘  speaking! It’s you bastards favorite time of day, a m̶̨̨o͞t̕͟i̕͜v̴̕e̵҉̢ b̶́͢ò͢dy̨̕ has upupu҉p! Get your asses down to the sh̴͞҉o͝͠p̷͝p̀͝i҉n̵g͏ d̵́͞i̴͟rua̷̸̡ŕ̵i̡u̶m͞͠! Don’t be late!”

… Uh?

Some part you wants to laugh, if only to smother how unsettling the delivery of that announcement was. Monobear’s voice had always been uncannily close to the sound of nails running down a chalkboard. over a loudspeaker. while the microphone was being dropped. but the added noise and what seemed to sound like two voices speaking at once wasn’t easy on the ears. At first you’re almost certain it’s simply the after effects of his voice that’s making your ears ring the way they are, or the cause of that dull throbbing behind your temple. Your vision, too, now that you’re paying more attention — the video feed of Monobear has been cut, but your phone, your hand, looks just like the screen did — striped, lined, breaking apart.

The End, in complete disregard of the classic build-up, happens quite suddenly.  There’s no time for any final goodbyes, I-love-yous, or last minute confessions — nothing was going to be put on hold while you kicked down your door and bolted down the hall to meet someone halfway in some sort of touching collision of bodies and hugs. No, at this point, you only have yourself and your surroundings — and then, not too soon after, only yourself.

You rip your eyes away from your hand, gaze onto what’s around and… man, rip in pieces, if I do say so myself. Everything is textured with static and lines, on a higher brightness, shaking and falling apart and in the distance you all but think you’re going insane when part of a building straight up vanishes, followed shortly by the disappearance of square patches of the ground, the sky—

The sky goes black. Not night-time black, either—it’s empty, gone, and though there technically shouldn’t be any light, everything that still hasn’t broken away and cut out of existence yet is illuminating, frizzling.  

In your rising panic, you find a moment to recall the error messages than pinged up shortly before the merge of Kaze and Mizu, how that seemed to have fixed itself (though everyone in both classes had nearly gotten a heart attack in the process), but this didn’t seem… No, this wasn’t some sort of error message from settings being overwhelmed, this was almost as if someone had started pulling plugs out.

(If you were so close to getting a heart attack last time, what… what would happened in this situation?)

You consider the possibility that this could be an end, your end, and that, if you were thinking in terms of a movie or show, then the screen cutting to black and THE END popping up would certainly be a quick way to end your story.  

(If that were the case, you can’t help but hope there’s an after-credits scene.)

… That said, you, well… You’re not having any of this, are you? A black screen and bolded THE END is far too tacky for your taste, isn’t it? No, this story isn’t going to end like this, your story isn’t going to end like this.

When the announcement first starts, it takes you only a few beats (one to stare blankly, the other to come to a decision) to turn off the screen and pocket it. You move quickly through Kaze, unfazed by the distortion around you, your chin tilted up, a certain anger and determination in your steps, a—

(…)

Wait. Wait, wait, wait, wait, what are you doing? In case you’re not totally aware, storytelling doesn’t work like that, you stay in the panel, I’m the one— you can’t do that, you’re suppose to stay—this isn’t part of the—

…

But let’s rewind, let’s zoom in a little more — as much as vaguely overviewing the situation is fun (certainly it’s far more easy to slip in the flowery prose), it is also a bit difficult to describe the details.

It’s been days, or weeks, since any of you have heard anything from the Monobears; not since the last trial, not since the blacked-out courtroom and the heavy silence that had followed it. There had been the arrival of the elevator, but not so much of a glimpse of the mascots running this place. Since then you’d been given enough time to come up with enough reasons for their absence — a misunderstanding between who was scheduled to talk them out of the Monobear Theatre as per usual, or perhaps they’d gotten far too caught up with complimenting each others eyes to remember to check the time — whatever it be, none of your reasonings explained the very obvious… lack of Monobear since then.

Never mind his missing presence—you’re used to him vanishing for days at a time, letting (as close as you could get of) normalcy sink into your bones before he screeches over Kaze and Mizu that something exciting was happening—but there’s been a lack in a few other things since then too, though you’ve tucked that concern away the best you can.

(He reminded you as frequently as possible how much work he did for you all, how you’d be nothing without him, but you only just now begin to understand his words.)

The shelves in the grocery store, kitchen cupboards and fridges haven’t been restocking, things haven’t been cleaned up the next morning, Monomi’s poolside snackbar closed down until further notice, the water never shutting off and the locations always staying unlocked. Nothing that would bother you in your day-to-day mutual-killing lifestyle—there was still more than enough food to go around and those curfew rules had always seemed tailored for a bunch of pre-teens rather than young adults—but it grew to the feeling that… you were alone here. Aside from the passing and brief exchanges of those left in your class, it was as if something had gone very, very astray.

You have at least another month before the food supply gets down to concerningly low amounts, if even you had that much time before The End all started. But who are we all kidding! If you’ve learnt anything over the weeks and weeks here, it’s that when something starts going wrong, something worse is quick to follow.

Your story starts something like this: an invitation. An invitation sealed with the winged crest of Hope’s Peak Academy. An invitation that, for better or for worse, was going to change your life. The memories surrounding the arrival of it are hazy at best nowadays, as if even if you rubbed your fist against a foggy window, you’d only find the outside still obscured with raindrops and the new smudges of your hand.

There might’ve been a celebration, balloons bought and the expensive wine glasses taken out of the cupboard. Hugs could have been passed around by relatives, advice and praise that’s now long since faded in your memory could have been exchanged, or it might have been something quieter, softer, more private — shared over dinner with soft smiles and nervous-exciting musings. What were the students going to be like? The teachers? Perhaps you’d gone out to treat yourself, shared the news with the employee serving your ice cream, watched as their eyes grew wide and felt the pride grow in your chest. Maybe all what you’d done was catch sight of the seal and scrambled to your phone, mass-snapchatted your friends the news and read over their replies with the invitation sitting in your lap.

Are you going to accept it? Haven’t you heard the rumors? Damn, nice job! What if one of those horror stories happen to you? haha, super-highschool level nerd, amirite ;p? Congratulations! Don’t forget the rest of us!

Good luck, have fun!

(...)

Your story continues: 24 classmates. 24 classmates and a clear blue sky or the reflection of water rippling across the floor. Either way, you see blue, and everything looks as though it is glowing. You share either handshakes and smiles with the people you’re to spend the next three years of your life alongside or give upturned noses and crossed arms as you regard the other claimed “Super High School Level”s. You make friends or watch friends being made, chattering over badly prepared canned-soup or yawning into the back of your hand as you gaze at teenagers walking to and fro. Your guides here are famous, two of Hope’s Peak's finest! They are full of either encouraging words or advice laced with sarcastic remarks, and your vacationing before the start of the new semester seems all too good to be true. You’re excited, proud, ready.

Then something akin to a movie happens, a student is killed — a student arrives — through a magic portal, sharp teeth and a red eye and a threat reeks from a bear’s mouth, and suddenly nothing is glowing anymore. One day you wake up and your guide (buried in a makeshift grave. an antler sticking from his forehead.) is dead. Murdered by one of you.

You don’t know how it happened, how it got to this point, what you did wrong other than accept, but now there is blood on your invitation. There is death and crying and sleepless nights and yelling and arguing and blood and fear and hollow eyes and glitches and trials and they were right and voting and nights curled together and is this place even real? and killing and where’s your family and blood and blood and—!

(...)

Hello everyone! 

This is just going to be a quick post detailing when our Informal Endgame is going to be coming up, and what to expect when it happens!

First off: Doubt Academy 5: Tsuchi’s Informal Endgame will be aiming to go live on Sunday, July 31st @ 3:00 PM EST (noon PST).

As promised, this Informal Endgame does not require any participation of the players — all what you need to do is tune in if you’d like! Endgame will be written by our current mods, with help from our masterminds, to answer all the long-awaited mysteries behind Kaze and Mizu! Find out what causes a pre-mature endgame within the plot, the masterminds and their stories, and what happens next for all the characters, in narrative with a... bit of a twist! 

We hope you drop by to check out what’s in store!